File photo of a U.S. soldier providing security during a coordinated, independent patrol along the demarcation line near a village outside Manbij, Syria. U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Timothy R. Koster

US To Maintain Military Presence In Syria After Withdrawal – OpEd

The US Secretary
of State Mike Pompeo delivered contradictory messages in a speech in Cairo on
Thursday, January 18. On the one hand, he said Washington will withdraw
American troops from Syria in line with Donald Trump’s momentous announcement
on December 19, and on the other, he emphasized the US will continue fighting
the Islamic State and will also contain the influence of Iran in the Middle
East region.

Obviously, both
these divergent goals are impossible to achieve, unless Washington is planning
to maintain some sort of long-term military presence in Syria. In an exclusive
report [1] by the Middle East Eye’s Turkey correspondent, Ragip Soylu, he
contends that the US delegation presented a five-point document to the Turkish
officials during National Security Advisor John Bolton’s recent visit to
Turkey.

“Those in
attendance with Bolton during the two-hour meeting at the presidential palace
in Ankara included General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, and James Jeffrey, the US special envoy to the anti-Islamic State
coalition,” according to the report.

A senior
Trump administration official briefed on objectives outlined at the meeting,
speaking to the reporter, said, “As the president has stated, the US will
maintain whatever capability is necessary for operations needed to prevent the
Islamic State’s resurgence.”

And then the
reporter makes a startling revelation, though hidden deep in the report and
mentioned only cursorily: “The US is not withdrawing from the base at al-Tanf
at this time,” the official said. The revelation hardly comes as a surprise,
though, as John Bolton alluded to maintaining long-term US military presence at
the al-Tanf base during his visit to Jerusalem on Sunday, January 6.

The al-Tanf
military base is strategically located in southeastern Syria on the border
between Syria, Iraq and Jordan, and it sits on a critically important
Damascus-Baghdad highway, which serves as a lifeline for Damascus. Washington
has illegally occupied 55-kilometer area around al-Tanf since 2016 and trained
a Syrian militant group Maghawir al-Thawra there.

Thus, for all
practical purposes, it appears the withdrawal of American troops from Syria
will be limited to Manbij and Kobani in northern Syria and Qamishli and
al-Hasakah in northeastern Syria in order to address the concerns of Washington’s
NATO-ally Turkey pertaining to the Kurdish militias which Ankara regards as “terrorists,”
and the fate of US forces operating alongside Kurds in Deir al-Zor in eastern
Syria and al-Tanf military base in particular is still in doubt.

The regions
currently being administered by the Kurds in Syria include the Kurdish-majority
Qamishli and al-Hasakah in northeastern Syria along the border with Iraq, and
the Arab-majority towns of Manbij to the west of the Euphrates River in
northern Syria and Kobani to the east of the Euphrates River along the Turkish
border.

The oil- and
natural gas-rich Deir al-Zor governorate in eastern Syria has been contested
between the Syrian government and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, and
it also contains a few pockets of the remnants of the Islamic State militants
alongside both eastern and western banks of the Euphrates River.

The Turkish
“east of Euphrates” military doctrine basically means that the Turkish armed
forces would not tolerate the presence of the Syrian PYD/YPG Kurds – which the
Turks regard as “terrorists” allied to the PKK Kurdish separatist group in
Turkey – in Manbij and Kobani, in line with the longstanding Turkish policy of
denying the Kurds any territory in the traditionally Arab-majority areas of
northern Syria along Turkey’s southern border.

Regarding
the evacuation of American troops from the Kurdish-held areas in northern
Syria, clearly an understanding has been reached between Washington and Ankara.
According to the terms of the agreement, the Erdogan administration released
the US pastor Andrew Brunson on October 12, which had been a longstanding
demand of the Trump administration, and has also decided not to make public the
audio recordings of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in
Istanbul on October 2, which could have implicated another American-ally the
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman in the assassination.

In return,
the Trump administration has complied with Erdogan’s longstanding demand to
evacuate American forces from the Kurdish-held areas in northern Syria. Another
demand Erdogan must have made to Washington is to pressure Saudi Arabia to lift
the Saudi-UAE blockade against Qatar imposed in June 2017, which is
ideologically aligned to Erdogan’s AKP party since both follow the ideology of
the Muslim Brotherhood, in return for not making public the audio recordings of
the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

It bears
mentioning that after the Khashoggi assassination and the international outrage
it generated against the Saudi royal family, Saudi Arabia is already trying to assuage
Qatar as it invited Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani to attend the
Gulf Cooperation Council summit in Riyadh on December 10, though Doha snubbed the
goodwill gesture by sending a low-ranking official to the meeting.

The reason
why the Trump administration is bending over backwards to appease Ankara is
that Turkish President Erdogan has been drifting away from Washington’s orbit
into the Kremlin’s sphere of influence. Turkey, which has the second largest
army in NATO, has been cooperating with Moscow in Syria against Washington’s
interests for the last couple of years and has also placed an order for the
Russian-made S-400 missile system, though that deal, too, has been thrown into
jeopardy after Washington’s recent announcement of selling $3.5 billion worth
of Patriot missile systems to Ankara.

In order to
understand the significance of relationship between Washington and Ankara, it’s
worth noting that the United States has been conducting airstrikes against
targets in Syria from the Incirlik airbase and around fifty American B-61
hydrogen bombs have also been deployed there, whose safety became a matter of
real concern during the foiled July 2016 coup plot against the Erdogan
administration; when the commander of the Incirlik airbase, General Bekir Ercan
Van, along with nine other officers were arrested for supporting the coup;
movement in and out of the base was denied, power supply was cut off and the security
threat level was raised to the highest state of alert, according to a report [2] by Eric Schlosser for the New Yorker.

Perceptive
readers who have been keenly watching Erdogan’s behavior since the foiled July
2016 coup plot against the Erdogan administration must have noticed that
Erdogan has committed quite a few reckless and impulsive acts during the last
few years.

Firstly, the
Turkish air force shot down a Russian Sukhoi Su-24 fighter jet on the border
between Syria and Turkey on 24 November 2015 that brought the Turkish and
Russian armed forces to the brink of a full-scale confrontation in Syria.

Secondly,
the Russian ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, was assassinated at an art
exhibition in Ankara on the evening of 19 December 2016 by an off-duty Turkish
police officer, Mevlut Mert Altintas, who was suspected of being an Islamic
fundamentalist.

Thirdly, the
Turkish military mounted the seven-month-long Operation Euphrates Shield in
northern Syria immediately after the attempted coup plot from August 2016 to
March 2017 that brought the Turkish military and its Syrian militant proxies
head-to-head with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and their US backers.

Fourthly, Ankara
invaded Idlib in northwestern Syria in October 2017 on the pretext of enforcing
a de-escalation zone between the Syrian militants and the Syrian government,
despite official protest from Damascus that the Turkish armed forces were in
violation of Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

And lastly, Turkey
mounted Operation Olive Branch in the Kurdish-held enclave of Afrin in
northwestern Syria from January to March 2018. And after capturing Afrin in
March last year, the Turkish armed forces and their Syrian jihadist proxies
have now set their sights further east on Manbij and Kobani.

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